TODD SEAVEY
author of Libertarianism for Beginners and writer of/speaker about many other things

Thursday, March 27, 2014

10 Ancient-Sounding (Yet Current) Cultural Tensions

How far have we
really come?

1. Opponents of gay
marriage sometimes argue that legalizing it logically leads to legalizing polygamy -- which wouldn’t
bother me, since, basically, (A) as a libertarian I think people should be able
to make whatever contracts they like and (B) as a quasi-traditionalist I’m
aware polygamy’s about as old and time-honored as monogamous marriage anyway --
arguably on firmer traditional ground than gay marriage, even.

So, I’m often
disappointed when people in favor of gay marriage hasten to add that
they would never condone legalizing polygamy.Why not?This just makes them
sound capricious and emboldens their social conservative foes.

Thus, I was pleased
with what happened when (intelligent and patient) foe of gay marriage Ryan
Anderson appeared twice on Kennedy et al’s show The Independents.I’ve met and like both of them, so I don’t
really want to see either of them destroy the other.And indeed, what ended up happening was that
Ryan ended his first appearance by pointedly noting that Kennedy (as I’d
noticed before) was guilty of the gay yes, polygamy never inconsistency,
and she sounded a little defensive about it.Lo and behold, they had Ryan back on a later show, and Kennedy revealed
that she’d changed her mind -- and now embraced legalizing both gay
marriage and polygamy.

I’m going to call
that a victory all around.

2. Fascinatingly,
the character of old-timey newspaper magnate T. Herman Zweibel has been resurrected
as an avatar of The Onion’s feelings of anti-capitalist
guilt over now running sponsored “comedy” (h/t Tushar Saxena), for which
the fictional Zweibel does the profit-loving disclaimer.I can’t really blame them, but they’re sort
of going the “if it’s ironic, we’re not really sell-outs” route.

(This is a slightly
less-weird mixed message than the Snickers ad that features construction
workers offering messages of female empowerment clearly meant to please real
female viewers, followed by the message that people just aren’t themselves if
they haven’t had their Snickers.)

3. As if that
report of hospitals heated by burning fetuses wasn’t disturbing enough, it
appears that even in the twenty-first century, you shall eat your gods’
flesh -- and so the ritual cannibalism
literally begins, in the form of a new service offering sausages
made from samples of celebrities’ flesh.At least meat’s not just for speciesists anymore.

4. One of the most
prominent anti-sexual-violence organizations is calling for
an end to the recent feminist hysteria over “rape culture” (h/t Vulgar
Libertarians).I have been reminded by
that whole misguided feminist meme -- according to which we are all guilty of enabling rape every time
we accept gendered culture -- of the “I blame society” death scene in Repo Man.As a thug dies, he makes that claim as an
excuse for his actions, to which our protagonist says, that’s ridiculous
because you’ve led a pleasant and pampered life just like the rest of us.

If we want to
understand a recurring crime, we should focus on what differentiates the
guilty from the rest of us, not throw a warm, aimless blanket of universal
guilt over everyone (but then, leftists -- and particularly feminists -- are
often too cowardly to hold individuals accountable and thus prefer to drag us
all down in egalitarian fashion).

The worst possible
route to responsible individual behavior, then, is blaming society.Yet, tragically, that’s what anti-rape
activists recently chose to start doing -- and just as they had been on the
verge of getting almost everything they wanted, in the form of a nearly 90%
reduction in occurrences of rape over the past three decades.

At least the
organization that Christina Ricci and others represent seems to be taking the
high road.

5. Cathy Reisenwitz has become the default example of a
(still rare) libertarian who plays these blame-everybody campus-leftist-style
culture analysis games.Naturally, these
sorts of culture critics (or Social Justice Warriors, as some have taken to
calling them) are oddly selective about which cultural pressures they take to
task and which ones they accept (in accordance with their own predilections, of
course).

So Reisenwitz deplores “privilege” and “rape culture” -- but
is deeply offended if anyone thinks that Duke pornstar (and fellow libertarian)
Belle Knox’s participation in rough, violence-themed porn might have something
to do with the emotional problems that made her a “cutter.”Of course, I’m also told that cutting became such a common ritual
among “emo” youth in recent years that it’s hard to tell the unstable from the
fashionable lately.None of this will
ever lead the Reisenwitzes of the world to campaign against porn, emo, or crazy
chicks, of course.The problem will
always somehow be old straight white guys.

Libertarianism,
unnoticed by most of the mainstream, is being destroyed from within by leftists
lately, and the real question is whether its impressive simultaneous rightward
growth can outpace its leftward dissolution.Perhaps every tiny movement is doomed to emulate the clashes and
stupidity of larger, more dominant ones.

6. A terrible
AlterNet article (h/t Lucy Steigerwald) listed

“...Ten Reasons FDR was [sic]
Hot” -- and it did not include “internin’
the Hell out of them Japanese-Americans!”Let’s not kid ourselves.The man
was a fascistic bastard.If you like him,
you’re probably a jerk.

7. To me, as a
media guy, the alarming thing about this call
for mandatory college-attendance for all (h/t David Friedman -- the other
David Friedman) is that it comes from a Yahoo finance reporter and former U.S.
News & World Report chief business correspondent, not to mention
award-winner and frequent TV guest.

Keep on whining that
no one’s listening to you if you must, leftists, but pieces like that remind me
that individual freedom and markets have
almost no allies, even among people tasked with understanding business. (And maybe markets shouldn’t get too much
respect, since such pieces force me to concede that truth is not what sells in
media, just as it’s not what sells in politics.)

It’s amazing, too,
that smiling black faces were used to illustrate a piece about legally
mandating what adults can do with their time.Some of us sincerely hoped those days ended
back in the 1860s.

(And before I get
accused, despite my obvious message here, of roundabout ethnic insensitivity
again, so soon after getting Facebook-unfriended for condoning non-Native-Americans
wearing Native American hats, maybe I should preemptively note that I forgot to
mention throughout that whole fracas that I’m 1/16th or more Native American
myself, if Grandma is to be believed.Not
that I think that matters, but sometimes such credentials seem to be the only
thing the left cares about.)

9. In a more
inspiring example of old-fashioned artistic
ways blending with new ones across ethnic lines, Wu-Tang Clan is
releasingexactly one copy of its new album (h/t Carl Oberg).

10. In another
victory for personalized goods, the first politician to suggest restrictions on
3D printers, state senator Leland Yee, who is also an advocate of gun control,
has been charged with gun-running.This
should not be seen as hypocrisy so much as government
pursuing what has always been its first goal: eliminate the competition.

1 comment:

If it was really about people's rights to make what contracts they like, or hold what rituals they like, I would not have a problem.

What it is about is invoking the power of the state to force EVERYBODY ELSE to CALL it "marriage", whether they believe it is or not. And I find it exasperating to see purported libertarians lining up with the statist bastards on this (while so many of them have no problem with my polygamous friends being treated like SECOND-CLASS CITIZENS!)

Also: judging from a lot of the rationalizations I see, most people seem to think "polygamy" is just a synonymn for "polygyny" -- and on this basis, abruptly switch from invoking "rights" and "equality" to becoming raving consequentialists carrying on about "the effect on women".

If *I* know living, breathing polyandrists, how many are there I don't know about?